Iksar’s Twitter Q&A #28 Summary – Wild Balance, Battlegrounds Rework, Pandaria Expansion, Auction House, Control Decks, Diablo in Hearthstone

(Sorry for missing the last Q&A, I didn’t have time to cover it throughout the weekend and then we had a pretty crazy Monday & Tuesday with the big patch and Mercenaries showcase)

Dean “Iksar” Ayala is a Lead Designer on the Hearthstone team, and he’s been doing weekly Q&A sessions on Twitter for a while now. They usually happen on Wednesdays, afternoon-evening Pacific Time (but he moves them to a different time slot or day occasionally, such as around big releases). People have been asking lots of questions about the game’s balance, design, specific cards, mechanics, and so on. Sadly, Twitter is kind of a mess when it comes to such things. Messages are short, you have to create long threads if you want to talk about something in detail, lots of comments get hidden, and it just doesn’t flow right. To make it a bit easier for all of you, just like during the previous weeks, I went through all of his replies and decided to make a summary of his most important talking points.

Check out previous Q&A’s here!

If you want to read the full Q&A – all the questions and answers – here’s the Tweet you should go to:

Hearthstone AMA #28

5:30PM – 6:30PM PST

Ask me a question about Hearthstone!

Or Design! (or anime…)

Some minor details for Mercs questions below ???? pic.twitter.com/4UajKAwNWI

— August Dean Ayala ???? (@IksarHS) September 2, 2021

Below, you will find my summary. It’s still pretty long, but Iksar tends to answer the questions thoroughly and includes a lot of details. I try to ignore “fluff” answers and not repeat points that have been already discussed in his recent Q&A’s, so if you want to learn more, go back to them. And if you want to read his full replies on all topics, check out the Tweet above. Things in parentheses are my own notes/comments and not Dean’s words. Let’s start:

• Dean thinks that Warlock’s playstyle in Wild is not a problem, it’s just too consistent and too powerful. Because of that, the deck is too popular and limits the range of experiences.
• He’s happy with all the Battlegrounds changes, there’s a lot of room for innovation and a lot of crazy things are happening. The feedback has been positive. But they are definitely considering balance changes, should lock those next week.
• It’s all but guaranteed that the team will do a Pandaria expansion in the future. Right now they just don’t know whether they want to do it “now” or bundle it up with the release of a Monk class (which is not in development currently, just something they want to do in the future).
• When it comes to nerfs, they are just looking at highest win rate cards from the deck – Crystallizer is high on that list.
• The reception of Diablo in Mercs has been great. Dean would like to do e.g. a full Diablo-themed set. The team had mixed opinions about cross-promo between different franchises. But they might at least consider more cosmetics based on other franchises.
• Dean would like to add a ranked version of Arena with matchmaking (while at it, they should also add a free/practice version with no rewards!)
• Traditional Control decks have a place in the game, but it doesn’t mean that they have to be viable every single meta (come on people, Control decks haven’t been playable only for a month, let’s not panic as if they were completely removed from the game forever).
• Dean implied that Mercs should be more F2P-friendly than people think by mentioning a few times that the mode has its own currencies and its rewards system on top of the current Quest system.
• Auction House (where players can sell/trade their cards) is something he has in mind, but it would have a massive and complex impact on the game’s economy, so no plans for now.
• Some people got upset about his Tweets (he probably means those about Wild, saying that having almost no balance changes for the format was their intention from the beginning), but his goal is to have clear and honest communication. If people don’t like the answers or reasons he gives, that’s good, because now they know about some people’s expectations and can talk about it internally.
• They will probably add Battlegrounds/Mercenaries cosmetics to the paid rewards track (Tavern Pass), but they will continue focusing on regular Hearthstone (Gold & packs) on the free rewards track.
• He doesn’t think that cards that can be reduced to 0 mana (like Giants) are an issue, it’s just a matter of individual balance and they missed on some of it in the past.
• Despite what some people say, the current meta is not that polarised – most of the meta decks have pretty even matchups and 65%+ WR matchups are rare.
• Dean would like to add personalized avatars to the game so players can represent themselves better.
• Hero cards are great, but just like Quests, they don’t want to do them every expansion. They will definitely be back in the future.
• He could see bringing some old mechanics like “Omega” cards, Spellstones or Joust when there’s a right expansion for them.
• If they ever release a Death Knight class, The Lich King from KFT would work the same, they would probably just adjust his wording.
• He’d like to change main menu / Hearthstone “box” to reflect current expansion (e.g. do Alliance-themed for Stormwind), but the art team is flooded with work expansion to expansion so it would be hard.
• Dean likes the idea of “one off” spell schools that push certain synergy in a class – e.g. Shadow in Shaman (Voodoo Shaman) or Fire in Warrior (Dragon Warrior).
• Battlegrounds is much harder to script than regular Hearthstone, because their editor wasn’t originally created for it so they do need a lot of workarounds to do pretty basic things.
• (As an answer to a suggestion that Team 5 should run some polls or Batte.net to learn people’s opinions) They already have a team dedicated to doing just that, they do a lot of surveys, polls, interviews etc. with people from around the world.
• He tries to not look at the custom card designs from the community unless they’re sent directly to him, and design team doesn’t use those as a reference.
• When it comes to bundles (like pre-orders etc.) they do extensive research and pick the things that are most appealing to players and sell best and they will continue doing that.